Home Sweet Home Reno: Month Five

Welp, kids, believe it or not- as of January 21st another month passed of us flexing our renovating muscle.  With the holidays, and where we are in progress, we don't have as many bullet points to pepper you with this month.  Hopefully this means that next month this post will be a big confetti mess o' bullet points.  RIGHT?!

Accomplishments:

• Installation of steel beam by dining room
• Paint color selection finalization (for real this time)
• Re-framing of wall under steel beam by dining room
• Plumbing rough-ins completed
• Window removed in Master Bath
• Glass block installed in Master Bath
• Fireplace brick cleaned
• Fireplace hearth installed
• Fireplace soldier course installed
• Replacement vanities received
• Selected counter top installation/fabrication subcontractor
• Selected painting/drywall subcontractor
• Solicited 587 electrical bids (ok, I might have exaggerated)
• Solicited 4 stair bids
• LOTS of packing

Purchases:

• Kitchen Faucet
• Kitchen Pot Filler 
• Master Bath Vanity Lights
• Guest Room Bedding

In the Pipeline:

• More fireplace work
• Counter top material purchase research

We will call this primarily an administrative month.  Our poor GC is a do-er and all the running around and setting up appointments really got his goat, I think.  If he can't cross an item off his to do list, he doesn't quite feel like he's accomplished anything.  We try to remind him that all this behind the scenes work is part of the whole gig.  I think he prefers playing with sledge hammers though.

The biggest "story" of the month was the fireplace.  You know, that brick treasure we un-earthed a while back.  So, we were super pumped to find the brick as, first and foremost, we love brick (totally used the royal we there). Secondly, we thought it would translate to time and dollar savings.  It's turning out that we may not be 100% accurate on either front, but, we do still love brick.  And our GC.  

After conducting quite a few interviews and soliciting a number of bids, GC found a guy who agreed to do the work needed to get our fireplace ready for her close up.  Said work entailed adding a soldier course to cover up the exposed firebrick, adding a hearth and just generally cleaning up the brick from it's years of being covered up by sheet rock.  I believe it was January 12th-13th that this work took place.

Friday January 15th on my way into work, I called to check in on our fearless leader and got an earful of expletives as he discovered that the hearth was laid incorrectly.  Fast forward to Monday January 18th when the subcontractor came out to discuss and decided that he would not do any re-work nor would he refund us any money.  Jose the bricklayer earned no good karma from the universe that day. I think he did earn a complaint to the BBB from a GC who shall remain nameless though.

Le sigh.  If you want something done right you do it yourself let Jimmy James do it.  So that's precisely what we agreed to.  At the time of my writing this we are 1 fruitless trip to Beaumont in search of our discontinued brick deep into this re-work.  Fingers and toes crossed that our fireplace has a more successful month in February.

Beautiful beam #2!  Steel is the new black in our house.  See the square on the floor?  that used to be a column.

You might wonder what the heck I do towards this reno (you aren't the only one).  I paint a lot of samples.  Like a lot.  I believe on this particular day I painted nearly an entire sample can of SW Colonnade Gray in various places around the house (see it on the right side of the door frame).  There's a cameo in Emery's room of SW Denim.

Framing for the new dining room entrance.

View of the dining room from the living room.  (Are you playing Where's Waldo with the Colonnade Gray like I am right now?)

The plumbers misunderstood GC's instructions for the height of the pot filler.  This is a liiiiiiittle high.

Jenny from the (Glass) Block.  (I've spent 2 weeks packing.  Don't judge my cheesiness.)

I'll get better pictures later, but this is the one window in the master.  It previously had plantation shutters.  We opted to remove them because we have them in our current bathroom and we never open them which turns the bathroom into a bat cave.

One evening I called GC on the way home from work and he told me he was laying out the fireplace brick for Jose.  I did not realize how detailed he was.

Let's see how geometrically gifted you are.  Can you spot the mistakes?  There are 20 bricks laid incorrectly.

Current state of our living room.  New brick (which hopefully matches better) in a pile to the right.  Stay tuned, my friends!